Eugene’s Comments

Indeed. This seems like a walking-on-eggshells method of improving the TPP. It could easily result in just a *different* group of wrong people making the decisions.

Sidenote: the report is correct, it's "millions of dollars". 1,000 million is a billion, which reflects the numbers you would expect to see. So "Digitally enabled services" - listed as 356,000 - would be 356 billion, for example. If it was thousands, then we'd only be talking about a few million here and there, which'd be peanuts.

As someone who has been a horrendous troll on other random sites in the past, and who only uses one other handle aside from my name, I can assure you all that removing anonymous commenters does not actually remove the assholes. You'd think it would but it doesn't.

Derpidy derp - pink AC was clearly making a bad joke at oblivious shill green AC. I know it was hard to parse, but come on. Pay attention to who is what. This goes for blue and grey AC above too. You guys are embarrassing us.

The alternative is getting something shoddy like OpenOffice, then having to deal with being on their own forever when it comes to managing and updating their software. Microsoft has an support structure that the computer illiterate can lean on. What does open source have? What open source services even exist that care about people who don't know how to make their software work?

"Given that all of Microsoft's products have viable open source alternatives"

Microsoft Word. Name ONE. ONE. Piece of open source word processing software that isn't a steaming pile of crap. Just one. You may not like word, but there is NO other word processing software out there that doesn't suck in horrible, horrible ways. That will either crash and send your documents into the aether, or lack every feature you're looking for. If you don't use Word, then your choice is either stability or feature-robustness, but not both. If you want both, you go back to Word. Period. End of story.

And humans whose job description was literally "computer" were employed all the way up to World War 2, when "operator" started to become the norm.

I think the point of all this is that we're waay to obsessed with giving individual persons credit for an invention, when in reality no single individual is EVER responsible for something like that. These things are the result of past progress building up over time to some critical point where the solution gradually becomes obvious to many people at once in many different ways. How they work together and pick each other's brains to make an achievement isn't something that happens over night.

We dismiss this notion because we desire heroes. Because it's easier for our minds to process "so-and-so invented x" rather than the more dull and complicated "these myriad interconnected events throughout history, propped up by this series of people, eventually lead to x".

Which is a shame, because it leads to exactly the sort of bickering we see in this comment thread.

From how consistently bad you are at this, and because of how often your ridiculous comments lead to content-heavy discussions, I sometimes wonder if you aren't actually Mike in disguise, presenting a straw man for everyone to beat on easily.

Hardly. Developers are typically very short-sighted (mostly because they also tend to be very short-lived), so even a large successful place like Ubisoft has a tendency to take a very dim view of QA near the end of a project. Near the start, they're great! They help figure out where the project is weakest and bug reports bring focus to the usually unfocused design team. But near the end...every new bug they report can threaten to delay the release, which is big money lost. And that's all they see. They can't see the money saved by fixing those late-project bugs, because that's post-release money which isn't on their radar.

Another reason is that these companies have zero memory. Every time a game is released, there's a massive brain drain in the form of layoffs. The only people who stay are the ones being paid the most - which happen to be the administrators with no idea how to actually make video games or probably even use computers. So the people who knew how to do this back in the day are no longer there. Hell, they're probably not even in the video game industry anymore. Most video game programmers aren't career-people, they stay in the field for about 5 to 7 years and then they go "Fuck it, I'm finding a place that respects me" and peace out of the whole industry.

That's part of why I think allowing terrible companies like Zynga to exist on Facebook was a smart move. Once you're able to get over that first difficult hurdle of getting your userbase to disassociate your brand from the services offered by 3rd parties operating inside your brand, you're basically in the clear to offer a wide range of 3rd party services with higher stakes involved, without fear of being held responsible if they fail.

At least where it comes to patent quality and keeping out obvious concepts, maybe the patent office should take a cue from Hollywood here. Producers look for good scripts by hiring people to read through their many, many submissions, and approve only the best. If a reader approves a script the producer deems unacceptable, the reader is in danger of being fired. This puts a HUGE incentive on the reader to deny more scripts than they approve.

Tons of "bad" movies still get made, obviously, but at the same time our standards for what counts as "bad" in Hollywood are extremely high. Even the worst drivel to be made into the next Rom Com still ends up being incredibly professional and structured. They still suck, but you have to admit that they suck in a very polished way.

On the other hand, it seems like Patents take the exact reverse view: readers have an incentive to approve more than they deny. Shoot, now imagine how bad movies would be if Hollywood operated *that* way!

Minecraft is based on an open source program called Infiniminer. I don't think it contains any of the concepts found in Dwarf Fortress except the incidental ones. eg "digging" and "procedural generation" and "lo fi graphics".

In fact, the most important mechanic of the game: using torches to create light in order to drive away monsters, is nowhere to be seen in either infiniminer or DF.